Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain believes Sunday’s game against Manchester United holds the key not just to Arsenal’s Champions League ambitions but their Premier League aspirations next season.

The Gunners lie third in the table after labouring to a 1-0 win over 10-man Fulham last Saturday and host the runaway League champions at Emirates Stadium this weekend.

“Obviously it’s a massive game for us with a Champions League place at stake but it’s also massive for next season with the confidence we can get from winning,” he said.

The Arsenal and England winger likened it to the 2-0 win over Bayern Munich in the last 16 of the Champions League, which was not enough to overhaul a first-leg 3-1 defeat.

Since then, Arsenal are unbeaten in the Premier League with five wins and a solitary draw — against Everton —coming last week.

“The win over Bayern wasn’t enough to get us to qualify for the Champions League quarter-finals but it was still a massive boost for us as a side,” said the 19-year-old, who on Sunday took to the streets of London to cheer on Marathon runners as a Lucozade Sport ambassador. “We’re still feeding off the momentum of that and a win over United can have the same effect.”

The odds are stacked against Arsenal, who have won only one of their last 11 encounters with United, a 1-0 victory at Emirates Stadium at the end of the 2010-11 season.

But Oxlade-Chamberlain is confident of halting Sir Alex Ferguson’s side and believes the Gunners have a realistic chance of vying with them for next season’s Premier League title.

“As a team we’re as good as anyone in the Premier League, right up there with the best in Europe and worldwide,” he added. “There’s a few things we need to tie up but we’ve been working hard as a team and becoming an increasingly tight unit and we’re winning games that we should win.

“We have quality players in our side and believe we can beat anyone.”

Arsenal are effectively in a three-way London fight for Champions League qualification. Arsene Wenger’s side are in third place on 63 points, one clear of Chelsea and two ahead of Tottenham, both of whom have a game in hand over the Gunners.

And Oxlade-Chamberlain believes that last year’s experience, in which they edged Spurs by a solitary point to automatically qualify for the tournament’s group stages, would hold the team in good stead.

“We qualified last year in difficult circumstances,” he said. “And we’re in a similar boat this year.

“It’s going to be very difficult and intense but we just have to ensure we’re taking everything we can out of every game left.”

By Oxlade-Chamberlain’s own admission, Arsenal have had an undulating season and struggled at times for any sort of consistency.

He said: “It’s been up and down for us this year. We’ve had some lows, the cups in particular. The defeats against Bradford and Blackburn really hurt us, they were games we felt we really should have won.

“And then there was the low of the first leg against Bayern.

“But as a team we’ve learned from those negatives and been able to enjoy some highs, such as the second leg against Bayern and, hopefully, we will continue like that for the remainder of the season.”

No shortage of criticism has been levelled at Wenger and his players and, to an extent, Oxlade-Chamberlain admitted it was with good reason.

He said: “Earlier in the season, people were saying we weren’t defending well enough, we weren’t passionate enough and weren’t helping each other out.

“But the support in this team feels really good now and it’s something we still need to keep building on.

“At the moment, it’s going well, we just need it all to come together in one final push this season.”